


A Brother of Thorberg

by kaijuburgers



Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Author is trans, Eating Disorder (Mentioned), Ficlet, Gen, Gender Dysphoria, Male Eivor (Assassin's Creed), Not Beta Read, Trans Eivor, Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-28
Updated: 2020-11-28
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:55:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27758005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaijuburgers/pseuds/kaijuburgers
Summary: It takes Layla an — in hindsight — embarrassing amount of time to figure it out.Alternatively titled: what if... transmasculine Eivor
Comments: 11
Kudos: 54





	A Brother of Thorberg

It takes Layla an — in hindsight — embarrassing amount of time to figure it out. She can feel herself-in-Eivor’s body twitch and wince whenever anyone calls Eivor a woman. She can feel the pull that Eivor has towards a shaved head, feels the warmth and satisfaction in the chest the two of them are sharing when Eivor sees how flat it looks underneath the hunter coat. In Eivor’s body, Layla feels unease — in the same way that in Bayak’s she felt the pain of a parent who’d lost their child, and in Kassandra’s she felt a deep longing for a home that would never exist again — but it’s easy to dismiss at first. The unease is just from the Animus, from the patched together hardware and the stress plugging in for dozens of hours at a time is taking on her body outside of it. And the displacement and the anger at displacement that she can feel burning in Eivor’s heart— that’s inside the Animus, but must be from Eivor’s birthright being taken. What else could it be?

In Asgard, Eivor is a man.

 _He’s a man everywhere_ , Layla thinks later on. _It was just in Asgard I realised._

In Asgard, Eivor is taller and his shoulders are broader. He wears his hair long, and that will confuse Layla for a while until the two of them return to England. There, Layla will let Eivor’s hair grow long for a little while, until the two of them will look at Eivor’s reflection in the River Trent and realise how wrong it looks on him when he has no beard. And when she feels the hair sheers against Eivor’s scalp, watches as clumps of hair fall to the floor of the barber shop, she feels the satisfaction that a decent compromise brings.

* * *

A Saxon man once called Eivor ‘she’ and ‘pagan’ and spat at him. In her past life, Layla would feel concern about her satisfaction— or maybe it’s Eivor’s? It’s hard to tell sometimes — at the way the hidden blade slid into him, quick and easy. In this one, there is no time for concern or for regret.

Eivor has no time for it either. He does not regret what kind of man he could have been had the dice fallen differently. He is what he is and his life has been what it has been. His body is not what he wants it to be, but plenty in life is not what he has wanted it to be. Fate is not in his hands. What he can do is work with what he can, change himself until he is good enough to live in. And so he does. The fabric bound around his chest helps, as does choosing his clothing so that it’ll hang a little loose on his body. And obscuring himself like this works well enough. Most of the time. Some of the time though, Eivor cannot help but feel out of control of his body and — much as he know it is simply the nature of fate — he hates it.

The bleeding is the worst. Once, when he was younger, Eivor thought to try and stop the bleeding from coming. He’d seen it stop for thralls and he’d tried to induce that in himself. But there is no fighting with a stomach that has not eaten for days, and going víkingr was more important to him than not bleeding. Instead, when he bleeds, Eivor makes it bearable by making himself bleed in a different way.

It’s like a ritual for him, lying still as more ink is poked into his skin, dot by dot, line by line. His skin bleeds as it’s pricked and he knows eventually that the pain of this and the pain that comes with his body’s nature will blend into each other— that there will be just one pain that he no longer knows the source of. And if he does not know the source of it, he can bear it.

Layla sees herself in it. It’s not because the same kind of pain — anxiety and imposter syndrome during her first month at Abstergo had become too much to handle, and she needed something to ground her in her body— but the series of birds tattooed on her back are there for the same reason.

* * *

When Eivor was younger, his favourite saga was that of Hrolf Gautreksson, even though he hated the ending. King Thorberg deserved better. It took him a long while to know why he held onto the story, clasped it in his heart like a jewel in his hand. Now — older and wiser and knowing who he is — he understands. The crew who came with him and Sigurd from Norway understand too. When they tell stories of raids past, whoever is speaking always calls Eivor a man and a brother, even if the tale is of a time before any of them — including him — knew.

When Layla is pulled from the Animus, she nurses a cup of coffee on the sofa. Sometimes —when she actually wants to take a break and isn’t just trying to fill the time it takes until Rebecca will let her back in — she smokes a cigarette. When the smoke hits the back of her throat it’s like nothing else, and that buzz will definitely wear off soon to be replaced by simply a relief from irritation, but right now it’s bliss. She tunes the two of them out, most of the time, and for the most part that seems to work fine. If they have something she needs to hear, they’ll tell her directly. But there’s a combination of name and pronoun that cut into her thoughts like the blade of an axe, pulling her out of them and back into the present.

“No,” she says, and her implant means the words come out steady and stable and as if they don’t mean anything, but they do. Rebecca and Shaun snap their attention towards her, looking at her as if she’s a bomb that could go off at any moment. Layla supposes she is. “Not ‘her’. _Him._ Eivor’s a him.”

There’s a moment of silence, with nothing hanging in the air between them. Layla can hear the call of the crickets from outside the shack.

“You can change Eivor’s appearance in the Animus if you want,” Rebecca begins, but Layla cuts her off, shaking her head.

“No,” Layla says, and her mouth and throat are dry. “How it is now — that’s what he was. That’s who he was.”

Rebecca and Shaun look at each other, and Layla can identify the exact moment they understand what she’s talking about.

**Author's Note:**

> This ficlet is incredibly self-indulgent and based off how I've been playing AC:V but... I really wanted to write about transmasculine Eivor. I clicked the 'let the Animus decide' gender option, and between that and the fact that I'm transmasc myself I ended up roleplaying my Eivor as a trans man. It actually works and flows really well, and I'm accepting it as my canon now.
> 
> Btw, the Saga of Hrolf Gautreksson contains a 'maiden king' character called Thorberg, who insists on being called he/him and king despite the reactions of those around them and threatens to punish those who don't. The ending is a bit :/ because they're captured and married off to Hrolf Gautreksson and take up sewing. But I also attached myself like a limpet to not so great media with vaguely trans themes as a young-en, so I can see Eivor doing the same


End file.
